A New Kushite Historiography: Three Recent Contributions to Nubian Studies

For almost two hundred years Nubian Studies was treated as a sub-discipline of Egyptology. Not surpisingingly, histories of Kush written in this tradition were strongly Egyptocentric in their emphases. During the last quarter of a century, however, Nubian Studies has emerged as a distinct discipline in its own right. The three books reviewed in this article reflect this transformation.     

On Disciplinary History and Textbooks: or Where Has Spatial Analysis Gone?

Change within the academic discipline of geography comes about as a result of internal struggles for disciplinary hegemony, for its ‘heart and soul’ and for resources. One approach to the study of these struggles is through examination of textbooks, authoritative statements of the discipline's contemporary condition. Analysis of a small number of recent texts shows that they reflect a current contest within human geography between two groups, stereotyped as ‘spatial analysts’ and ‘social theorists’. The former are being ‘written out’ of disciplinary history, despite their continued vitality. Reasons for the continued presence of, and investment in, spatial analysis within human geography are rehearsed.     

What Osama bin Laden Did Not (Want to) Know: Manly Palmer Hall,Islam, and Conspiracism

A copy of The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928) by Manly Palmer Hall (1901–1990) was listed among the books possessed by Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) in his last lodgings. The prolific Canadian-born, US-American author advanced a positive interpretation of Islam within an esotericist worldview. By meticulously scrutinising primary sources, this article aims at mapping his conception of Islam and understanding its role within Hall's interpretation of history. Furthermore, drawing upon scholarly discussions of conspiracism, as well as on examinations of bin Laden's figure and messages, this article assesses whether Hall can be described as a conspiracist author and whether his interpretation of history and Islam could have fascinated the founder of Al Qaeda.     

Folklore for a New Century

Folklore as a discipline had promising beginnings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the academic study had begun to fade in academies, and the substantive content had lost a great deal of public interest. Three books deal with the practice of folk studies and ask the question of where folklore might go in the twenty-first century. One looks at the theoretical history of the discipline, while the other two have an ethnographic bent and open up folk materials to embodied and reflexive analysis.     

改革开放以来我国人文地理学译著出版的特征、问题与建议

国外人文地理学著作和教材在我国的翻译出版主要是1990年代以来的事,商务印书馆作为出版大户在改革开放之初就出版了大规模的世界区域地理译著,其后所译著作多为受到好评的欧美论著或教材,但与原版书出版的时滞较长。相关译作缺乏规划、质量参差不齐、对教科书重视不够、学科分布不均衡等成为主要问题。加强有关译作的规划、提升翻译作品在学术评价中的地位、加强翻译队伍建设、重视教材的翻译和引进、加强薄弱学科著作和教材的引进和翻译等是今后发展的主要建议。     

英国流行人文地理学导论教材之评述与借鉴

选取英国时下流行的两本人文地理学概论教材《人文地理概论》和《人文地理学导论:21世纪的议题》,分析了他们的优缺点,并与美国的同类教材进行了比较。《人文地理概论》基于后现代主义的理念,采用30人的大团队,全新的结构(基础+论题+背景三部分),试图展示当代人文地理学的多样性。后一本教材则以问题为导向,采用21人的大团队,充分利用地图、表格、照片、热点知识窗,用手册性著作的写法,全面展示了当代人文地理学的研究主题;缺点是视觉冲击力不够,缺乏对有关研究取向历史发展的论述。     

‘Well weather is not a girl thing is it?’ Contemporary amateur meteorology,gender relations and the shaping of domestic masculinity

Although there is a growing scholarship on the history of amateur meteorology, contemporary amateur meteorology has tended to remain a largely invisible social phenomenon. Moreover, questions of female involvement and gender relations therein have tended to be overlooked. This paper seeks to address this gap by drawing on interviews with members of one of the most important amateur meteorological networks in the UK—the Climatological Observers Link. The research identifies a predominantly male bias within amateur meteorology in the UK, offers insight into why and how this bias has emerged and explores the implications of this bias for gender politics in the home. It also considers the way in which, as a pursuit that is very much situated within the domestic sphere, amateur meteorology complicates traditional framings of the home as a female realm and contributes to a domestic masculinity.     

Booming Business. Communication,Print and Advertisement in the Seventeenth Century

ABSTRACT

News, print and the associated communications were not just a booming business in the early modern period, but are – research-wise – a “hot topic” at this moment as well. The seven volumes discussed are syntheses of many years of research. The books show overlap due to geography and events, and their stress on news bearing media of various sorts, all within the seventeenth century. Each of the volumes is written by an expert on either the Baltic Sea, Germany, or the Dutch Republic. The foci vary from the exchange of information to the printing of newspapers and books, to the use of advertisements.     

Miloš Obrenović and the deposition of a Constantinopolitan Patriarch

Abstract

In my limited study of the Greek and Serbian Churches in the nineteenth century, I had found numerous cases of Greek meddling in Serbian affairs, but never a reverse case. Then I came across a passing reference in Gavrilovic´s fine biography of Prince Milo? Obrenovi? of Serbia (who ruled from 1815 to 1839) to Milo?’ playing a major part in ousting a Patriarch of Constantinople. Following up Gavrilovi?'s citation led me to the following letter written by Prince Milo? during his triumphal visit to Constantinople in 1835. It was written (and it should be noted this means dictated since Milo? was illiterate) to his wife Ljubica on 28 September 1835. Since I have never come across any reference to the events Milos describes in any work I have made use of on the patriarchate in the 19th century, I have taken the liberty of translating the letter from Milo?’ Serbian both to call attention to it and to make the text available to a wider range of scholars. The original text is to be found in Mita Petrovi?, Financije i Ustanove obnovljene Srbije do 1842, Beograd, 1901, pp.336–37.     

NEW HISTORIES OF EMOTION

At the beginning of the twenty‐first century, there was a growing sense that historians had neglected the emotions and failed to think seriously about them. Since then, there has been explosive interest in the history of emotions. What precipitated this development? What has this focus on emotion added to our historical understanding, and what does a historical perspective contribute to research on emotion? Two recent books help us think about these questions. In The History of Emotions, Jan Plamper offers the first book‐length introduction to this field available in English; in Emotional Lexicons, Ute Frevert and a group of fellow historians trace continuities and change in the vocabulary of feeling from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the end of the millennium. At stake, in both books, is the idea that emotions are historically contingent—that history has the ability to shape and transform even the most basic features of human experience. This review essay engages with the central arguments of these books, and offers a somewhat different interpretation of the history of emotions. What is called for, the essay suggests, is not first and foremost a separate history of emotions nor the adding of emotion to existing histories, but new histories that systematically incorporate emotions into their analyses. Historians should seek to demonstrate how emotions are an integral part of history and historiography in a more general sense. Systematic attention to emotions not only adds nuance to a historical narrative, the essay concludes, but also fundamentally affects our ideas about how history actually happens.     

TWO CONTRASTING FRENCH APPROACHES TO HISTORIOGRAPHY

This essay reviews two books in the French Que Sais‐je? series by Charles‐Olivier Carbonell in 1981 and by Nicolas Offenstadt in 2011 on the topic of historiography. Offenstadt's volume is intended to bring Carbonell's up to date, but goes in very different directions. There is general agreement among historians that a fundamental reorientation has taken place in historical thought and writing in the past half century, about which quite a bit has been written in recent years in the West, including in Latin America, East Asia, and India. But this is not the theme of either of these volumes. Carbonell tells the history of history from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth‐century Annales; Offenstadt is not interested in examining major trends in historiography as much of the historiographical literature has done, but in analyzing the changes that the key concepts that guide contemporary historical studies have undergone. For Carbonell's chronological narrative of the history of historical writing, theory has no place; for Offenstadt, who proceeds analytically, history and theory are inseparable. He deals specifically with changes in conceptions of historical time, of the role of documents, of the place of history within the social sciences, of the centrality of narrative, and finally of historical memory.     

Le scepticisme et les hypothèses de la physique

The History of scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza is often called upon to support three theses: first, that Descartes had a dogmatic notion of systematic knowledge, and therefore of physics; second, that the hypothetical epistemology of physics which spread during the xviith century was the result of a general sceptical crisis; third, that this epistemology was more successful in England than in France. I reject these three theses: I point first to the tension in Descartes’ works between the ideal of a completely certain science and a physics replete with hypotheses; further, I argue that the use of hypotheses by mechanical philosophers cannot be separated from their conception of physics; finally I show that, at the end of the xviith century, physicists in France as well as in England spoke through hypotheses and I examine different ways of explaining this shared practice. Richard H. Popkin’s book serves therefore as a starting point for insights into the general problem: to what extent and for what reasons some propositions in physics have been presented as hypotheses in the xviith century?     

新世纪以来中华人民共和国史研究的发展和成熟

新世纪以来,中华人民共和国史研究作为一门新兴的历史学科,取得了显著的成绩和进步。近十余年来,随着国史学界对国史研究基本问题认识的不断深化,出版了一批具有通史性的国史著作、资料性研究著作、专史性研究著作,使国史重大问题的研究取得了新的进展。认真研究已有成果,评述国史研究的发展状况,并提出推进国史研究的一些思考,将为这一新兴学科的发展提供有益借鉴。     

Archaeology as Anthropology Revisited

Anthropology was established in the USA during the middle of the nineteenth century. From the beginning, archaeology was considered a part of the discipline, a notion that continues to this day. However, over the course of the past 160 years, periodically, the place of archaeology within anthropology is questioned. Often, this has a reflection in the growth or shrinking in membership of the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association. I explore these trends and try to explain them in terms of the history of anthropology.     

Environmental Geochemistry and Health

Abstract

During the first half-century of political independence, Americans were on the periphery of international science, little more than a minor appendage of European science. However, beginning about 1830, Americans began making great intellectual and institutional strides in science. Although progress varied from discipline to discipline, the end result was the establishment of an autonomous community, conducting research comparable to and in some case superior to, that of their European counterparts. This review records this evolution, utilizing three disciplines as case studies – astronomy, botany, and experimental physics.     

Soviet Geographic Literature

A review of geography publishing in the Soviet Union analyzes the output of literature by categories of end-users: (1) publications designed for professional geographers, including works on theory and method, university textbooks, periodicals and serials, and bibliographic and information services; (2) geographic publications intended for the public at large, including regional studies of different levels of sophistication on the Soviet Union and foreign areas as well as popular geography books; (3) geography textbooks and study aids for elementary and secondary schools, which represents the largest portion of geography publishing in terms of volume, with an average of 4 million books printed each year. Recommendations for improvements in geography publishing include the creation of a Council on Literature, made up of professional geographers; the establishment of a centralized publishing house that would specialize in geography (except for textbooks, government publications and special-purpose literature), and the establishment of a translation journal that would disseminate some of the more significant foreign articles in Russian translation.     

Men in the Communities of Dominican Nuns – Sister‐Books Discussing Priests and Friars

This article discusses the relationship between Dominican nuns and their caregivers (priests and friars) with the help of sister‐books written by the Dominican nuns themselves in the first half of the fourteenth century. My main focus will be on analysing the way religious men were described in these books and asking how this discussion was related to the everyday life of the nuns in the Dominican convents. I will suggest that the sister‐books can give a new and perhaps unexpected view of the relationships between Dominican nuns and their spiritual caregivers, as these texts suggest that nuns preferred local secular priests over the friars, even though they accepted the religious authority of the latter. I will argue that although the sister‐books were literary products, they had a close connection to the lived reality of nuns and that they can tell us about the interaction between nuns and religious men in their service. However, these texts also formed the ideas of nuns and kept the old attitudes towards priests and friars live, even when the interaction might have already taken other forms in practice.     

我国人文地理学研究、教学与出版关系论——以出版为中心的探讨

地理学界关于教学与研究的关系有些研究,关于研究与出版、教学与出版的关系几乎没有研究,但人文地理学界对这两种关系没有什么研究。研究表明,教学与研究相互依赖,研究是教学的基础,教学是研究成果得以普及和传承的途径之一,还可能促进研究的深入。教学和研究的质量和水平与出版有相当的关系。教材建设需要引进足够的重视并根据成果写出,研究的理念需要拓展,需要培养问题意识、学术史意识、与同行对话的意识和理论意识,还应注意著述的学术规范。学术出版要坚持高标准,以品质为导向,兼顾经济效益和社会效益。     

朝鲜吴庆元《小华外史》考论

《小华外史》一书,1 9世纪朝鲜吴庆元父子编撰。“小华”,即“小中华”,指朝鲜王朝。明朝灭亡以后,朝鲜君臣上下多有崇祀明朝之举,同时编修了大量追述和思念明朝的史书。本书就是在这种政治文化背景中产生,内容是记载朝鲜王朝与明朝的历来关系,而在明朝灭亡以后,则详述朝鲜举国怀思明朝、祭奠明朝皇帝和优礼明朝遗民及其后裔的史实。吴庆元父子用了几乎半个世纪的时间才把其编成。全书征引史料十分丰富,参考了明、清、朝鲜以及日本的史料1 80余种,几乎每条史料都标明出处,史学方法严谨扎实,学术视野广阔。在思想上大倡尊周思明理念,宣扬尊王攘夷、尊明贬清观念,将清朝视作夷狄。此书之编撰在清朝已经统治二百余年之后,是值得注意的史学现象,对于研究明清时期的中朝关系具有重要的参考价值。     

Philosophers,Naturalists, and Antipodean Encounters, 1748-1803

This article addresses a complex nexus of discourse and praxis: varying Enlightenment visions of Man; emergent ideas about human differences; and encounters between European scientific voyagers and Indigenous people in New Holland (Australia) and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) at the start of the nineteenth century. Discursively, I trace two strands of ‘anthropological’ thinking. One, philosophical and economic, is epitomized in French and Scottish stadial theory. The other is naturalist and culminated in Buffon's natural history of man. Both were appropriated from the late eighteenth century by a nascent science of race. With respect to praxis, I chart the reciprocal impact of metropolitan theory, antipodean experience and local agency by selective comparison of materials produced by the voyages of Matthew Flinders and Nicolas Baudin in Australian waters in 1801–1803.